


Even The Stars Sometimes Fade To Gray

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Culling, Gen, Post Game AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 09:43:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s almost as nervous as you are, not used to being alive among strangers. Sometimes he forgets to breathe, or chokes on his own tongue. You sign intake forms one handed. It’s a brave new world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even The Stars Sometimes Fade To Gray

  
You get culled.   
  
You remember a planet where it was called _therapiercing, diagnostrikes_ , and the tools were scalples and mind probes, were culling forks and heads on pikes outside the scienterrorist’s labs, you remember staple tropes of white rooms and crying protagonists and glistening blue-green slices of brain. You remember troll Sucker Punch. Alternian Sucker Punch. But without Rose—John, Dave, Dirk, anyone—you’re the leader again, Karkat Vantas, just smart enough to know what you’re doing is phenomenally stupid but not bright enough to think of anything else. But you have to learn assimilation, which means learning what’s normal and how you aren’t.

So you take your ancestor-descendant as a native guide and go to the culling centers, and you ask the receptionist for intake forms. You say, politely, as politely as you can, that you and twenty three other trolls have just been through kind of a big fucking ordeal, and you heard they might be able to help you. Even that much is exhausting, is baffling. You have never really asked for help before in your life. The world _‘help’_ , on your tongue, feels bizarre. Someone else must be saying it, your Beforan self, the kid you maybe should have been. You think _‘Pupa’s first inanity’_ , and have to stop fear-giggling long enough to take a pen from adult claws, each as long as your fangs and painted bubblegum pink.   
  
Kankri’s large, soft hand in yours is tense enough to dig pale lines across your knuckles, and he twitches and stares about with his bright red eyes and chews on his sweater sleeves, nervously, babbling about triggers, about the condescension involved in prescribing medication. You step on his foot and he mutters about neurotypical privilege and the monstrous fallacy of putting any stock in an artificially constructed social norm. He’s almost as nervous as you are, not used to being alive among strangers. Sometimes he forgets to breathe, or chokes on his own tongue. You sign intake forms one handed. It’s a brave new world.  
  
There are adults everywhere, trotting here and there with calm purpose and level gazes saturated terrifying blues and indigos, and they lead you farther and farther into the building. You chew on your tongue till it smarts and go this way when they say and that way when they say. You sit on padded chairs in offices and Kankri talks ceaselessly, panting a little in odd places, midword. Coughing on his own spit. He twists your hand in his, like he’s the one protecting you, and you let him. You want Gamzee, you want Kanaya, you want Dave. Someone to look after you and take command. But you’re in charge again, you have to do this.   
  
“Mr. Vantas,” a tall man says, coming into the room suddenly. His eyes are nearly Eridan’s violet. You go still as a hopbeast beneath the descending shadow of a ripperwasp, you make a terrible little snarl before you can help it. You can feel yourself bristling, your claws flexing. He’s a seadweller.   
  
“Yes,” Kankri says, and stands up. “That’s us.”   
  
The man regards you, and you scramble to your feet, released from your paralysis, and you nudge Kankri back behind yourself. He doesn’t know how to handle himself in a fight against real people.   
  
The seadweller looks at his clipboard, then back at the two of you. There’s a terrifying glint in his dark eyes, something sharp and intent, measuring, and when his hand moves up from his side Kankri’s sweaty grip on your wrist is all that keeps you from flying at him. He was only bringing up a writing utensil, making a little mark on the paper. You feel nauseous with tension, ready to scream. There are no other exits in this room, not even vents or grating, and he’s standing before the door. You swallow, hard, willing the roaring in your ears to go down, your racing heart to slow. You want to stab him before he comes for you so badly you can taste blood in the back of your mouth already, blood and bile and the metallic pulsing sting of adrenaline. Adults want two things from planetside wigglers, a quick snack or a quick—a quick—  
  
The seadweller takes a step to the side, and pushes the door back open. He sits down in a chair, and smiles without showing his fangs. He crosses his legs at the knee. You take a breath, deep and deliberately unshakey, and Kankri sits down as well. You’re too wired; you stay standing.   
  
“My apologies, Mr. Vantas…es,” the seadweller says. “I didn’t intend to alarm.”  
  
“He’s easily triggered,” Kankri says, and the adult nods as if that even means anything. You want to throw up on both of them.   
  
“Where… ah, not to be overly intrusive, but where exactly did your young compatriot come from?” the seadweller asks. He leafs through a few pages on his clipboard. You want to break the thing over your knee. He purses his lips, says, “You and eleven other young trolls have been listed as missing for three sweeps, so I’m more than interested as to where you, and especially your genetic duplicates, returned from.”  
  
You open your mouth, close it. You glance back at Kankri, thrumming with tension, and he reads your temporary uselessness off your face. He clears his throat.   
  
“Please excuse my indelicate phrasing, but in the interests of brevity I must risk triggering you for apocalyptic ideation,” Kankri says, and the seadweller nods and gestures for him to continue. Kankri licks his lips, shrugs his shoulders. “We played a game, and the world ended.”  
  
The seadweller goes very still, and raises the end of his pen to his lips. “Mr. Vantas, the world is still here,” he says, softly, tenderly, and you can see just the barest the razor tips of his fangs when he essays a smile.  “We are, right at this moment, alive.”  
  
“You’re welcome,” you say. It comes out a terse growl. Kankri, not very gently, pulls you back into your chair, and you sink your claws into the squishy armrest to try and get ahold of yourself. You need to not be antagonizing highblood adults three times your size, you really  _are_ crazy. You want a fight so badly you could scream.   
  
“You’re welcome,” you say more politely, calm and reasonable. You try out a smile. You knead at the chair arm. “We—my team and me—played the same fucking apocashit game, in our own world. And we won. And when us leaders had the chance to chose, which world to go back to, Kankri’s or mine. Which one would overwrite the others. And I chose yours. It seemed like a better decision, your stupid hugsplanet where culling means coddling and not—not—” you’re fucking it up. You suck air between your teeth. “I could take anything, you know, I wasn’t choosing for me, alright, I’m not some fucking pansyass weakling, Alternia was fine. It was home. But the others. They’re tired, and they’ve already died a lot. And I thought we could rest here.”  
  
You glance up from your lap, from Kankri’s big soft pink-knuckled hands, and meet the seadweller’s purple gaze squarely. “You’re welcome,” you repeat yourself again, only this time pleading, somehow, and to your horror your voice cracks. Some badass! You always cry. At the worst moments, you always cry.   
  
You hunch into yourself, ashamed, you wipe your nose like that could hide anything.   
  
“Don’t l-look at me,” you say thickly, shaking all over. “Kankri. Do the p-p-paperwork with the highblood.”  
  
“Coldblood,” the highblood says gently. “We’re all equals here.”  
  
You make the worst nose, kind of a hoarse strangled shriek, disbelief and fury and a weirdly aimless loss bubbling up in your throat like a teakettle boiling over. You shove out of your chair, blind and angry and ready to kill. The seadweller knocks his chair over as he jumps to his feet, his fins flared wide and intimidating at the sight of your sickle.  
  
“I can’t,” you babble, edging around him, your sickle point wavering disgracefully in front of you. He has his clipboard pressed tightly to his chest, and you know, he needs it, he was just trying to help you but he’s so big and you're ashamed. You're scared. “Kankri, do the — th-the thing, the things that n-need you to do them, do those. I can’t, I can’t be here. Fuck.”  
  
“Karkat Vantas,” Kankri snaps, “control yourself!”  
  
“No, shut up!”  
  
You bolt.   
  
Kankri finds you under a bush in a courtyard. The moonlight is relentlessly pink and you are worn out on crying and your mouth burns with vomit. There’s a loose circle of adults ranged around you and you are trapped and miserable with shame and you can’t kill them and they’re not going to kill you but you can’t come out. You’re so scared, it’s like hot irons around your every limb, around your throat.   
  
“What are you doing?” you hear Kankri ask sharply. “My compatriot has undergone a number of severe ordeals that have left him with a great deal of very significant traumas which are being triggered at this very moment by your presence! Is he a beast, to be cornered so? Has your training in the esteemable culling arts taught you only to pursue the first moving object that passes at requisite speed through your fields of vision? Leave him alone!”  
  
“We brought sedatives,” a low adult voice says defensively. “We were just trying to coax him out—”  
  
“Get your coercive methodology away from him, he needs space, not to have his brain chemistry forcibly altered by strangers! The very nerve of you. Shame! Shame on you all. I demand that you clear the area immediately!”  
  
There’s shuffling, and a gradual receding. Kankri shuffles over to your bush. You want to die.   
  
“Are you alright?” he asks, hoarsely. “I, um. I don’t actually know what to do when someone’s, uh, actually been triggered. Don’t tell anyone.”  
  
“I’m not,” you sniffle. “I wasn’t.”  
  
“I beg to diff—” you swat him through the bush. He gets a leaf in his mouth.   
  
There’s silence for a while.   
  
“My apologies,” he says stiffly. “I didn’t mean to cast aspersions on your ‘badassitude’.”  
  
The word is so awkward when he says it, so transparently on loan from Pyrope the elder, it sets you giggling.   
  
“Stop it,” he says. “I wasn’t joking.”  
  
You only laugh harder.   
  
“Karkat! I find your mockery offensive in the extreme—I was being serious, I’m always serious—your condition is incredibly nontrivial, have some dignity—”  
  
“I’m sitting under a bush in a puddle of vomit,” you laugh, “and somehow you’re even more ludicrous. Badassitude! The fuck are you even on about, you slobbery douche.”  
  
You crawl out, awkwardly, and Kankri takes your hand again the moment you’re in range.   
  
“What the fuck are we going to do?” you ask.  
  
“Finish our intake interview,” Kankri says. “Then apologize to the staff for our rather significant transgressions. I can’t believe I raised my voice at adults, what must they think of me?”   
  
You breathe in, out, in. “This world sucks,” you say, and fuck you but your voice is thin and wobbly.  
  
Kankri hugs you. You are very surprised, but it’s not that unpleasant. It’s just what they do where he’s from, what they do here. You put your arms around him and squeeze back. He’s scratchy and smells of wool and sweat and something kind of warm and sweet. Familiar. Like you, like who you could have been, still a tremendous pain in the ass disgrace of a troll, but not entirely worthless. Not entirely irredeemable. There’s something good in him, somewhere.   
  
“This world ‘sucks’,” he says gravely.  
  
You laugh again, sniffle hard. You stand up. “Come on, you horrorshow,” you say determinedly. “Getting our shit sorted, take two.”  
  
You lead each other back into the culling center.  

**Author's Note:**

>  _I see the bare moon raise his big, bald head_  
>  _I see my friends played the fool_  
>  _I'll make my own way in the wide world_  
>  _Just now I don't want to wander too far_  
>  —The Weepies, "Hideaway"


End file.
